Tag: pug

We Just Turned One!

Yesterday was exactly one year since Dian, Anna, and I incorporated Prairie Postgres NFP. Never in my wildest dreams could I imagine myself being a founder of a not-for-profit, and even less could I imagine how it would change my life and shift my priorities.

We celebrated in the best possible way – the Illinois Prairie Postgres meetup attendance skyrocketed (I think we had more than forty attendees). We had long, deep, and engaging conversations, and we had cake!

My Community Work

The past several days, starting with my return from PGConf.dev, were densely filled with various community activities.

On Sunday, I went to the Chicago Code and Coffee meetup (I planned to do this for a couple of months, but ran into a conflict each time).

It was as loud and loosely organized as it could possibly be with over three hundred nerds in one not-so-large space. The Capital Cafe decided to sponsor the meetup with free drinks, and everyone took advantage of this opportunity. I thought I would not survive in this noise level, but the organizer allowed me to speak immediately after the volunteers, so I was able to advertise my events and myself :). As a result, I have several people joined our new user group, and several RSVPs to Tuesday event.

On Tuesday, I hosted a second meetup of Prairie PUG. Inspired by what I saw at DevOpsDay Chicago, I announced the Developers’ Summit and invited application developers who use Postgres to discuss their pain points and possible solutions. I planned this event for a while, but had to postpone it several times. Finally, i was able to make it a reality.

It went really well (I neglected to take pictures of the group discussions, and only took some during the final presentations, but it was a definite success). The conversations continued after we were done with the “official” part and went back to the cafe for remaining pizza.

Then on Wednesday, I went to yet another meetup! it was the 10th anniversary of AWS meetup. I was planning to start attending this meetup, but for one reason or the other, it never worked. It almost didn’t work this time as well, because there was one more event on the same evening, but I decided I can come for just an hour, and it will be better than nothing!

I came, and talked to the organizers, and also found out that several of the Postgres meetup members attended the AWS meetup as well. I talked with several people, and told them about Prairie Postgres, and distributed my flyers. I saw that two more people joined my meetup next day, so it was not completely useless!

Another event I wanted to attend on the same day was a local CAPS beat meeting. I consider these meetings of police with local residents very important; it was unfortunate that I had so many conflicts this year and could barely attend any of them. This time, I was a little bit late, but was still able to sit through most of the meeting. Out Beat representatives talked about the crime statistics, asked about the incidents we observed on our blocks, explained which apps to use to report crimes, potentially dangerous situations and problems which do not require police involvement. I picked up several flyers for future reference.

I think it was my mistake that I ignored all “other” meetups in the past, and I am glad I started to change it. Overall, I feel like slowly starting to get back to my “normal self.”

June Chicago PUG

That was the most challenging meetup I ever had, in a positive way, you may say, but still challenging. It was a joined meeup with Chicago Open Source Data Infrastructure Group. I came to their meetup several months ago and talked to their organizer, and we agreed to stay in touch. Later, he contacted me asking whether it would be possible to use our training center for their meetup. I said: unfortunately, not, and then he asked me whether I would be open to a joined meetup. we agreed on June 11 and announced it in our respective User Groups.

At first, the rate of RSVP was as usual: a couple of regulars responded right away, and then more and more responses were coming here and there. Usually, there is a spike of RSVPs in the last couple of days before the event. I was even a little bit worried that the response rate was slow in the beginning since Matty didn’t post the talk topic from “their” side. But then, all of a sudden, I saw more and more RSVPs, and when the total number on both meetups got to sixty-five, I started to panic. Usually, I have 40-45 RSVPs, and I expect 25-30 people to show up, and I have all the formulas how to calculate the right number of pizzas, and they won’t work for a bigger numbers.

By the end of the day on Monday, the total number of RSVPs (not counting those were people forgot to put their full names) was eighty-six! I was unsure whether the printing machine at the security desk was working (it didn’t work the last two times), so I decided to print the list and to ask security to prepare the bdges in advance.

It turned out that great minds think alike, and they already came up with that same idea (and the printer was working!). I ordered $800 worth of pizza and almost killed myself bringing the drinks from CVS all by myself (I was a complete idiot about that, there were people whom I could ask, and I didn’t!)

Fifty two people showed up! It was amazing! And everything worked fine with Zoom. We had great networking both before and after the talks, and several people approached me and asked whether they could help with future meetups. However, there is one thing I started to worry about. I was not presenting, I just said a couple f words in the beginning. Still, there was a line of people who wanted to talk to me after the meetup. You can usually see this line after a very successful conference presentation. A dozen people wanted to talk to me to know my opinion about some aspects of Postgres and their career and life in general :).

I find this concerning because the meetup should be about Postgres, not about me. If I won’t be there, things won’t happen, and that’s something I need to work on.

My audience is slowly but surely becoming more diverse…

May Chicago PUG

Wish Granted When I Lost Hope!

For years, I’ve been trying to attract college students to my meetups, and I tried all different strategies, involved external help, and organized meetings with some college officials – all in vain! On the eve of my last meetup, I saw several new names in the RSVP list, and I almost started to wonder whether it was some scam :).

And then, four of them actually showed up, and they were actual live students, and they listened and asked great questions and talked to my speaker afterward.

I asked them how they found this meetup, and they told me they were just “looking for technical events” and saw it popped up!

The moral of the story, I am afraid: “It’s not me, it’s them,” meaning that it’s not I do not advertise enough, but it’s there is not enough understanding of the importance of attending events of that kind!

Chicago PUG Meetup

On Tuesday, I hosted the second live meetup after the pandemic. I should have felt less anxious, but I didn’t. It was the first time I had invited speakers, and not even locals – people traveled, they made an effort to represent their company. Also, although I had a lot of RSVPs, the whole even was in danger because it was the day of the first snow, and nobody in Chicago wants to be out on the first day of snow unless they really need to be out.

Since most people have an option of working remotely, I was afraid that I will end up with zero participants. Fortunately, people came, although only half of those who RSVPed, but I was happy and thankful to everybody who came!

About People’s Interactions

I liked how my Wednesday’s meetup went. I only regret that I didn’t put enough time into advertising, and there were not many people attending. The talk was brilliant. It was new Bruce’s talk “Democratization of Databases,” where he talks about opensource products and how their development is different from commercial products. 

Our discussion ended up being rather political; that’s why I am not posting it on my professional blog.

But you know, I think it was very appropriate. There are times when you have to be political, times when you can’t enclose yourself in your professional world. And now is that kind of time. 

On another note, I started to assemble my team of volunteers. And now, when I started, I do not know how I lived without any help! I felt so good when people responded to my call. When they started to reach out telling me that they want to help, to give back. One of the people who reached out told me: I want to compensate for all these times when I would just come and sit in the corner, listen to the talks, eat pizza and go back home. 

I can see now how many things we didn’t do to give us more publicity. Interestingly, when I talk to other people about giving their enterprise more publicity, I name all these things I didn’t do myself :). I hope that by the time of the next meetup, things will start to look different.

This week was very intense. I had many things going on at work, and I also had to talk to many people for a very long time :). I can’t recall this level of interactions I was involved in since the pre-pandemic times. I am tired, but I also feel very good. I feel empowered by people’s responses. 

Acting Like A Leader

I am listening to “Atomic Habits,” a well-knowing book, mostly building on the “Power of Habit,” which I read a long time ago and really liked. 

As it often happens, you notice the closest ideas to what you are thinking about at the moment. This time, it was the well-known idea of “if you want to become something, act as if you already are.” To be precise, in the book, the author rephrases it like “do not say: I want to run a marathon, say: I want to become a runner.”

The reason I paid attention to this statement is the conversation I had on Friday. Among other things, I was asked about “things that work” with the Chicago PUG. While answering that question, I started to list all the things I usually mention when people ask me, “How did I build it.” I talked about having specific dates, announcing meetups early, starting on time, engaging the audience, coaching the first-time zoom speakers. And I ended my answer with one simple statement: I am a community leader, people are looking up at me, and I felt the responsibility to act.

And that is the most important reason that Chicago PUG is running regular meetups, one of the very few PostgreSQL meetups regularly running during the pandemic. 

I vividly remember how I felt a year ago. I had to make difficult choices, and at that time, I was very unsure of what is the right thing to do, and I was questioning myself and my actions, and the situation was changing not by days but by hours. 

First, I announced the change of speaker. Then, I announced the rescheduling. And two weeks later, I announced going virtual. I opted to be a first zoom speaker because I knew it could be a very miserable experience (and it was). But the important thing was that we were able to continue our activities and the PUG members responded with great attendance. 

I am very proud of all of us, and I hope that later this year, we will be able to switch to the hybrid meetups:)

The Book Is Official!

I will write more on one of the subsequent days, but I really want to share my news, which one of my former co-workers called “the next most important news of the day after inauguration.”

Last week, our book became official, we are on Amazon, and we will be published at the end of April.

Here is it: Amazon.

I made an official announcement a today’s meetup of Chicago PostgreSQL User Group. Also, we officially announced the open source database postgres_air, which we developed to illustrate the concepts from the book. But it ended up to be more than that, and we decided to give it to the community as our contribution.

I am happy in all possible ways 🙂

Here is the recording, if somebody wants to hear a lot of me :). Tomorrow, there will be LinkedIn blog posts, and I will upload the video there as well, but not everybody follows me on LinkedIn 🙂

Be Careful What You Wish for…

 In the course of the past couple of weeks, several things have happened in my professional life. Although I am trying to separate my professional blogging and my personal one, sometimes they are very deeply intervened. 

First thing: I had a great meetup of the Chicago PostgreSQL User group. It was not easy to organize three speakers, and I am very happy I did. Also, with a tremendous amount of help from my fellow co-organizer, we secured two great speakers for our November PUG. I can’t even believe that I got these speakers:). And now, I need to plan their entertainment in Chicago, manage attendees, etc. Leading a User Group takes a lot of effort and time, although it might look like it is “just finding a speaker once a month.”

Second thing. The last paper I got accepted for the real CS conference was in 2016 (the actual acceptance was at the end of 2015). Since then, I tried to submit my work several times, and each time it got rejected. At the end of August, Boris and I submitted a paper to yet another conference, and finally, it got accepted! For me, it was like breaking the curse:). For those who are interested in my professional updates, I will post more in the World of Data. For this blog, the important thing is that it was accepted as a short paper, so by October 28, we need to make it 1/4 shorter. Considering that we already made it almost half shorter from its original size, that task is virtually impossible to complete. Boris suggests we just remove three random pages or one section out of it:).

Third thing. Back in summer, I emailed the organizers of the 2Q PG Conf conference in Chicago a couple of my suggestions of what I would like to do for the conference. First, my training was accepted, and instead of 4 hours, which I planned, it was announced as a full-day training. Yes, Boris and I wanted to have “a good reason” to consolidate our 30 years of training :), but this is just a little bit more work on top of our regular jobs. Especially counting the fact that my talk with Chad about bitemporality was also accepted, and Boris’ talk on Postgres and Academia was accepted as well.

All that I wanted :). Except now, I am not sure how I can fit it all in my life. Oh, and also, I have an important deadline at work on October 28. And my team was recently assigned extra responsibilities, but we do not have an extra person yet.